In the summer of 2013, after my first of three academic years teaching at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow, I was back in the American state of Indiana – the Republican stronghold in which I was born and raised, and whence the very evangelical former vice president, Mike Pence, also hails.
That same summer, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed his country’s ‘don’t say gay’ law, which banned the dissemination of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” to minors (known in non-Orwellian language as life-saving information that LGBTQ children need to thrive).
I was at an outdoor concert in a suburb of Indianapolis with some of my evangelical relatives when this topic came up in conversation, and I distinctly remember how dismayed I was when one of them opined on how “refreshing” it was to see a political leader “finally standing up to the gay agenda”.
